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Olympic tale proves golden

Personal tales elevate story of '60 Olympics

By Duane Davis, Special to the Rocky

Published July 24, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Runners make their way, above, past the Colosseum in Rome in 2006, during a race dedicated to the 1960 Olympic marathon won by Abebe Bikila, right.

Photo by Riccardo De Luca / Associated Press/2006

Runners make their way, above, past the Colosseum in Rome in 2006, during a race dedicated to the 1960 Olympic marathon won by Abebe Bikila, right.

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The 1960 Olympic Games held in Rome hosted 83 nations with a total of 5,338 athletes. The largest team was Germany's, with 321. The U.S. fielded 305 and the Soviets 299. At the other end of the scale was Suriname with exactly one competitor: Siegfried Esajas, an 800-meter runner who, as David Maraniss writes in his new book, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, was "destined to oversleep and miss his one and only heat."

If track and field and the other contests were the obvious focus, politics, as Maraniss amply demonstrates, was the ever-present struggle roiling just beneath the surface, a brutal competition for bragging rights about which country produces the fastest, the strongest, the best.

In 1960, the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union seemed hot and was getting hotter. The Cold War was spies, ICBMs and Sputnik; it was jostling for military position around the world, from a divided Germany to a Castro-led Cuba. In May 1960, just a few months before the Olympics were to begin, a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured alive and held for trial. The brinksmanship between these two nations was volatile and possibly heading toward nuclear war.

That did not mean, however, that the two superpowers didn't have time to worry about whether or not one of their citizens could jump over a pole higher than a citizen of the other country. For U.S. President Eisenhower and U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Krushchev, sports were war by other means, and they wanted to win - on the field and off.

In retrospect, some of this jockeying in what amounted to a really big King of the Hill game seems amusing. Maraniss follows the derring-do of track star David Sime as he attempts to get a Russian athlete to defect to the U.S.: Sime "was an Olympian with an extra assignment: run for your country, and bag a defector for your country as well."

The target was Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, a 21-year-old broad jumper. Igor had come to the attention of the CIA when he started learning English and, on trips to meets outside Russia, "bought American jazz records, books, magazines, as many totems of Western culture as he could find, and smuggled them home in his suitcase." Shaking off his Russian handlers, Igor managed a meeting with Sime and expressed a cautious interest in living in the U.S. But at their second meeting, the CIA agent handling the affair, a "Mr. Wolf," bustled in and began speaking Russian to Igor, demanding to talk to him alone. The agent's brusque manner spooked Igor and the defection was off. Maraniss does not record if "Mr. Wolf" had a shoe phone or not.

Ultimately, though, the Olympics are about the men and women who, more than anything, battle against themselves, their own bodies and the limitations of those bodies. The 1960 Olympics, when dirty laundry is shoved aside, were no exception, and here, Maraniss shines.

One of the book's strongest threads is Maraniss' story of Coach Edward Temple's Tigerbelles, the all-black women's track team from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University and the team's extraordinary star, 20-year-old Wilma Rudolph. A victim of polio when she was 4 years old, her left leg was so damaged she had to be carried from room to room. Her parents had, between them, 22 children. The neighborhood the family lived in was "poor and black," their home without indoor plumbing.

By the time she was a freshman in high school, Wilma had shed the braces and high-top shoes and was on the basketball team, where Coach Thomas happened to see her "breezing down the court on the fast break (and) invited her to attend his track camp." A year later, only 16 years old, she won a bronze medal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics with the Tigerbelles in the 400-meter relay. It looked like nothing could stop her.

But getting pregnant in her senior year could, and did, stop her - at least for awhile. How she fought back to a spot on the 1960 Olympic team with the Tigerbelles and then won 3 gold medals (the 100- and 200-meter dashes and the 400-meter relay) and became a crowd favorite (known in the Italian press as La Gazzella Nera - the Black Gazelle) is a stirring story that is told here with great drama and affection.

This is true as well with the tales of many other athletes, winners like Rafer Johnson (gold medal in the decathlon) or the young Cassius Clay (gold medal in boxing) and losers like the once seemingly invincible Ray Norton, who came to the Games with high expectations and went home empty-handed, a dejected and broken man.

But let's close with the image of the unknown Ethiopian long distance runner Abebe Bikila. He was, Maraniss quotes from a news report at the time, "A skinny barefooted palace guard in the Ethiopian Army of King Haile Selassie (who) ran the fastest marathon in history tonight."

Twenty-four years earlier, Italy, under Mussolini, had brutally invaded and conquered Ethiopia. Now, within days, Maraniss writes, "A felicitous saying by then had swept his homeland: 'It had taken Italy a million-man army to defeat Ethiopia, but only one lone Ethiopian soldier to conquer Rome.' "

Perhaps that is politics, but it is first, and always will be, the story of one man running 26 miles through the dark night of Rome, his bare feet slapping softly on the pavement with a straggling line of runners behind him and somewhere ahead of him a clock ticking and ticking, waiting for him to cross a line.

And that's why you'll want to read this book. For Abebe Bikila, Wilma Rudolph, Rafer Johnson and all the others. Maraniss has told their stories well, always with sympathy, but with a clear eye not just for the triumphs but for the disappointments as well.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed The World

* By David Maraniss. Simon & Schuster, 496 pages, $26.

* Grade: A-

In person

Maraniss' local appearances:

* Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St. Boulder. 303-447-2074

* Thursday, 8 a.m., at the Denver Newspaper Agency building, 101 W. Colfax Ave. The event begins with a continental breakfast. Cost is $15. (RSVP at spj.org/colorado)

* Thursday, 7:30 p.m., at the Tattered Cover, LoDo, 1628 16th St. 303-436-1070.

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